More good shutdown news - the EPA won't be able to plot against the people

Government Shutdown to Delay EPA $1 Gallon Gas Price Hike

As the death toll for Government Shutdown Apocalypse 2013 continues to grow, it appears that the EPA’s plans to make it even more expensive for Americans to drive a car were “shut down” by the government shutdown.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will take one of the biggest hits of any federal agency if the government shuts down this week, operating with under 7 percent of its employees, according to guidance issued by the agency.

Just think of how much less the EPA will be able to do with only 7 percent of its employees. That EPA SWAT Team may have to sit out the week. Someone else will have to send $700,000 to Thailand’s pig farmers. And someone else will have to hike fuel prices.

Among those furloughed would be most workers at the Office of Air and Radiation, which is in charge of writing and implementing most of the EPA’s major air pollution rules. The clock would also stop, for now, on the EPA’s eagerly-awaited proposal on renewable fuel volume standards for 2014.

Who exactly is eagerly awaiting this proposal? Drivers who can’t wait to pay a buck more for gas.

Not to mention the folks who run most outdoor power equipment like lawn and garden tools. Next time you have to have the carburetor replaced due to ethanol sludge clogging it up, be sure to think of the EPA bureaucrats. And wish them longer layoffs in the future.

Happy Earth Day!

Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend

So when is Al Gore going to get his fat butt over here to shovel the snow off my driveway?

A lengthy bout of snow shoveling is just what Al Gore and the other ecoweenies deserve as punishment for the Global Warming fraud. However, they haven't accepted the obvious once more and are taking to the popular press in droves to tell us that all this cold weather and snow is yet more proof of global warming:

No matter what happens, it always confirms their basic premise that the world is getting hotter. The weather turns cold and wet? It's global warming, they say. Weather turns hot? Global warming. No change? Global warming. More hurricanes? Global warming. No hurricanes? You guessed it.

Nothing can disprove their thesis. Not even the extraordinarily frigid weather now creating havoc across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The Los Angeles Times, in a piece on the region's strangely wet and cold weather, paraphrases Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert as saying, "In general, as the globe warms, weather conditions tend to be more extreme and volatile."

Got that? No matter what the weather, it's all due to warming. This isn't science; it's a kind of faith. Scientists go along and even stifle dissent because, frankly, hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants are at stake. But for the believers, global warming is the god that failed.

Why do we continue to listen to warmists when they're so wrong? Maybe it's because their real agenda has nothing to do with climate change at all. Earlier this month, attendees of a global warming summit in Cancun, Mexico, concluded, with virtually no economic or real scientific support, that by 2020 rich nations need to transfer $100 billion a year to poor nations to help them "mitigate" the adverse impacts of warming.

This is what global warming is really about — wealth redistribution by people whose beliefs are basically socialist.

Bzzzt - game over, ecoweenies.

St. Obama saves us all from Global Warming

Golly, who knew? According to the Associated Press' Charles Babington and Jennifer Loven , Barack Obama singlehandedly saved us all from Global Warming! There will always be scoffers, but here's proof that no one can deny: no sooner did St. Obama get his "unprecedented" Global Warming agreement than a vast blizzard hit the Northeast USA. Here's St. Obama's plane arriving back in Washington DC:

More laughs at the Copenhagen Global Warming Clown Circus

If you want a nonstop laugh fest, you can't get much better than the Copenhagen Global Warming Clown Circus. The big news overnight was a "leaked" copy of the final draft agreement:

When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?

No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly.

After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.

But boy! Was this crass, or what? The apocalyptic document revealing that even if the Western leaders hand over all the climate Danegeld demanded of them, appropriately at the venue of Copenhagen, the earth will still fry on a 3C temperature rise is the latest transparent scare tactic to extort more cash from taxpayers. The danger of this ploy, of course, is that people might say “If we are going to be chargrilled anyway, what is the point of handing over billions – better to get some serious conspicuous consumption in before the ski slopes turn into saunas.”

Of course, the most serious conspicuous consumers are the Third World thugs and clowns that thought Global Warming was the ticket to new palaces, new Mercedes, and more jewelry for their grasping wives. Then there were the United Nations kleptocrats that thought they had finally come up with a way to ride on a gravy train pulled by the taxpayers of the developed world. I won't even mention the religious acolytes of the Church of Global Warming and the voracious profiteers in the developed world who are beneath contempt for trying to force this scam on the rest of us.

This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.

If there were not $45 trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons.

And the sooner we laugh them out of town the better. Speaking of "soon to be out of town," even Santa Obama's last minute visit with a bag of goodies provided by the American taxpayers and a list that he wasn't checking to see who was naughty or nice failed to cheer up the clowns. It must be rough on a man of Barack Obama's vaunted sensitivity that the panhandlers weren't satisfied with his handout. Hmm, while he was there he could have pitched Chicago for the Olympics again.

Today's Hoot: Gore Effect to Hit Copenhagen Global Warming Boondoggle

Al Gore may have canceled his $1,200 per ticket book promotion event scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 17th at the great Copenhagen Global Warming Boondoggle, but the Gore effect on the Copenhagen weather apparently lives on - Record Cold To hit Global Warming Conference (Copenhagen To Break Dec 17th Record by 7 Degrees!):

Once again it's bad timing for a global warming meeting as all time record cold temperatures are set to strike the the U.N. global warming conference in Copenhagen.

Last week "warmists" were confronted with reports that November Arctic Sea Ice growth exceeded the 1979-2000 average and that "in general, the ice edge is now at or slightly beyond its average location".

The bad timing for "warmists" this time is that Copenhagen, home to the UN global warming conference until December 18th, is set to break the all time low temperature record for December 17th.

Here is a screengrab of Copenhagen weather from Weather Underground for Dec 17th 2008 that shows the all time cold record for that date (24 degrees) was set on Dec 17th 1997:

(screen grab elided)

As can be seen from this screen grab from Weather Underground, forecasters are predicting this record will be shattered by 7 degrees as temperatures dip down to a record low of 17 degrees on Thursday December 17th:

(screen grab elided)

Actually, if you follow the Weather Underground link for the forecast, the low temperature predicted for the 17th is now up to 21 degrees, so I count it as further proof of the Gore Effect - when Crazy Al stays away the temperature rises.

Watch the Global Warming hustlers con the suckers

Christopher Booker in today's UK Telegraph provides a bird's eye view of the Global Warming hustlers at work conning the suckers:

What is the connection between Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian railway engineer who has been much in evidence at the Copenhagen climate conference, as chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and an Indian-owned steel company's decision to mothball its giant Teesside steel works next month, ripping the heart out of the town of Redcar by putting 1,700 people out of work?

Nothing of this complex story is likely to be heard in the dreary concrete shed outside Copenhagen where, as temperatures drop towards freezing, 17,000 prime ministers, officials and climate activists are earnestly discussing how the planet is warming up towards extinction. But it certainly sheds a little light on a colossal worldwide racket these delegates are helping to promote, because the end of the story is that we shall all be paying to export thousands of British jobs to new steel plants in India, for no gain in the reduction of worldwide CO2 emissions.

In a nutshell, after Margaret Thatcher revived the moribund British steel industry, the steel works at Redcar in the UK was one of the jewels but it was sold to Corus (a Dutch company) which in turn was acquired by the steel part of the Indian Tata conglomerate, Tata Steel. More or less OK so far, but now comes the real con job via Global Warming:

One of Corus's prizes was the Redcar steel works, once Europe's largest blast furnace. It is this which is now to be mothballed, according to Corus because of worldwide "over-production". But this is transparently not the case, since its new owner, Tata, is planning to more than double its steel production in India over the next three years. Furthermore, only last month Corus announced plans to build a 20 million euro plant in the Netherlands, with the help of 15 million euros from the EU and 5 million euros from the Dutch government.

The real gain to Corus from stopping production at Redcar, however, is the saving it will make on its carbon allowances, allocated by the EU under its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). By ceasing to emit a potential six million tonnes of CO2 a year, Corus will benefit from carbon allowances which could soon, according to European Commission projections, be worth up to £600 million over the three years before current allocations expire.

But this is only half the story. In India, Corus's owner, Tata, plans to increase steel production from 53 million tonnes to 124 million over the same period. By replacing inefficient old plants with new ones which emit only "European levels" of CO2, Tata could claim a further £600 million under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism, which is operated by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – the organisers of the Copenhagen conference. Under this scheme, organisations in developed countries such as Britain – ranging from electricity supply companies to the NHS – can buy the right to exceed their CO2 allocations from those in developing countries, such as India. The huge but hidden cost of these "carbon permits" will be passed on to all of us, notably through our electricity bills.

Thus, at the end of the day, Redcar will lose its biggest employer and one of the largest manufacturing plants left in Britain. Tata, having gained up to £1.2 billion from "carbon credits", will get its new steel plants – while the net amount of CO2 emitted worldwide will not have been reduced a jot.

Golly, paying through the nose to impoverish ourselves and to support the kleptocrats at the United Nations. Sounds like a heck of a deal to me! And speaking of those kleptocrats:

But it just happens that Dr Pachauri's other main job, apart from being chairman of the [United Nations' Global Warming cheerleaders at the] IPCC, is as director-general of the Tata Energy Research Institute, funded by Tata, which he has run since 1981.

I'm sure ole Doc Pachauri is more than worth his weight in gold to Tata. Speaking of which:

Last year, on official figures, buying and selling the right to emit CO2 was worth $126 billion across the world. This market, now enriching many of our leading financial institutions (not to mention Al Gore), is growing so fast that within a few years it is predicted to be worth trillions, making carbon the most valuable traded commodity in the world.

Forget Big Oil: the new world power is Big Carbon.Truly it has been a miracle of our time that they have managed to transform carbon dioxide, a gas upon which all life on earth depends, into a "pollutant", worth more than diamonds, let alone oil. And many of those now gathered in Copenhagen are making a great deal of money out of it.

A truly monumental con job fer sure!

The best part though is that Global Warming is a complete and utter fraud based on cooked data, but it has the key aspect of a truly good con game: the suckers (AKA left wing hacks and pols) want to believe!. Y'all try to keep warm and have a Climategate Christmas:

 

"A man can never have too many flashlights"

Whenever I try out the old saw that "a women can never have too many shoes"  on Mrs. Philosopher, she counters that based on my example, "a man can never have too many flashlights." I have to confess that it is true - I have one (or more) for every room in the house and every desk and every vehicle, not to mention special purpose ones like spotlights, lanterns, and penlights.

Lately, I have been reading the LED flashlight reviews, checking out the various on and offline stores, and converting or replacing most of the existing flashlights with LED flashlights. The advantages of LEDs are obvious - much better bulb life and better battery life than incandescent bulbs. In recent years LED prices have gone down and LED flashlights have gotten brighter and started using standard batteries instead of the usually pricey (and unrechargeable) coin cells that used to be typical. LEDs are also showing up in much more than light bulbs, but even sticking to that, traffic lights everywhere are converting to LED as well as many exterior car lights excepting headlights for which LEDs are still not bright enough.

Now here's the big puzzle. How did this major power saving technological improvement occur without Senator Barbara ("Call me dopey") Boxer and some Federal bureaucracy mandating its use like the annoying and poisonous Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFL)? It sure is a puzzlement, but maybe, just maybe, it has to do with LEDs actually being better than incandescent bulbs for many applications and not some just some ecoweenie fantasy.

So why don't they make LED replacements for regular incandescent light bulbs? Actually, if you look around you can find some and they provide similar power savings and much better color rendering than CFLs without the poisonous mercury, but at the moment they are still rather expensive. Hopefully they get down the commodity pricing curve soon before the greentards give us all mercury poisoning.

Obama energy bozo Steven Chu says Americans are like unruly teenagers

Steven Chu, the global warming lunatic that Barack Obama selected to be Energy Secretary, got all cranky yesterday because those pesky American citizens aren't signing on to wear ashes and sackcloth over global warming:

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees Americans as unruly teenagers and the Administration as the parent that will have to teach them a few lessons.
...
“The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” Dr. Chu said. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.”

About what you would expect from this arrogant weasel and this arrogant administration, but heck, why not show these clowns what unruly really is?

I'm shocked! The Germans are stocking up on those nasty incandescent light bulbs!

Germans Hoarding Traditional Light Bulbs:

As the Sept. 1 deadline for the implementation of the first phase of the EU's ban on incandescent light bulbs approaches, shoppers, retailers and even museums are hoarding the precious wares -- and helping the manufacturers make a bundle.

The EU ban, adopted in March, calls for the gradual replacement of traditional light bulbs with supposedly more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL). The first to go, on Sept. 1, will be 100-watt bulbs. Bulbs of other wattages will then gradually fall under the ban, which is expected to cover all such bulbs by Sept. 1, 2012 (see graphic below).

Hardware stores and home-improvement chains in Germany are seeing massive increases in the sales of the traditional bulbs. Obi reports a 27 percent growth in sales over the same period a year ago. Hornbach has seen its frosted-glass light bulb sales increase by 40-112 percent. When it comes to 100-watt bulbs, Max Bahr has seen an 80 percent jump in sales, while the figure has been 150 percent for its competitor Praktiker.

"It's unbelievable what is happening," says Werner Wiesner, the head of Megaman, a manufacturer of energy-saving bulbs. Wiesner recounts a story of how one of his field representatives recently saw a man in a hardware store with a shopping cart full of light bulbs of all types worth more than €200 ($285). "That's enough for the next 20 years."

Not when you are going to sell the incandescent bulbs on eBay. Speaking of which, have you heard how the ecoweenies banned the inhalers used by asthmatics and replaced them with "earth friendly" substitutes that don't work and are more expensive? You can apparently still buy the old fashioned kind of inhalers that work on eBay.

I'm all ready for Earth Hour!

While I am on the topic of pointless ecoweenie gestures, I just wanted to be sure that you all were ready for tonight's "Earth Hour" foolishness, because as you can see we certainly are here at the Country Store. Instead of shivering in the dark, we plan to roast weenies and make S'mores over the heat of the searchlights. As for the folks who are burdened by guilt that their ancestors moved out of caves and grass huts and tried civilization instead, they are welcome to life in the Stone Age.

Now it's dishwasher detergent smuggling!

Lefties are all about ill-conceived programs that are mostly worse than the "problems" they purport to fix (e.g. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) or the current mortgage mess which in the name of affirmative action forced banks to give mortgages to deadbeats and illegal aliens). However, the mother lode of leftist nostrum comedy gold lies in the the various ecological dicta imposed by the ecoweenie branch of the libtard family which the regular folks always manage to get around. My favorite still is toilet smuggling, but we now have a new candidate - dishwasher detergent smuggling.

SPOKANE, Wash. – The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don't work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation's strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. The ban will be expanded statewide in July 2010, the same time similar laws take effect in several other states.

But it's not easy to get sparkling dishes when you go green.

Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand. The culprit was hard water, which is mineral-rich and resistant to soap.

As a result, there has been a quiet rush of Spokane-area shoppers heading east on Interstate 90 into Idaho in search of old-school suds.

Real estate agent Patti Marcotte of Spokane stocks up on detergent at a Costco in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and doesn't care who knows it.

"Yes, I am a smuggler," she said. "I'm taking my chances because dirty dishes I cannot live with."

There's more hilarity by following the link, but if the ecoweenies get the ban imposed everywhere, what can the average person do besides rewashing by hand?

For his part, Beck has taken to washing his dishes on his machine's pots-and-pans cycle, which takes longer and uses five gallons more water. Beck wonders if that isn't as tough on the environment as phosphates.

"How much is this really costing us?" Beck said. "Aren't we transferring the environmental consequences to something else?"

Welcome to liberal land where goofy gestures prevail. As for me, my latest get rich quick scheme is to fill up a storage unit with dishwasher detergent - I can sell it along with the incandescent light bulbs I have tucked away. By the way, that investment is looking mighty good since compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL) are still crap.

Edwardsville, Alabama gets the Obama spirit!

Who says small town folks are bitter? Barry Obama should be really proud of the residents of  Edwardsvilla, Alabma who are jumping right into the Obama spirit thing:

At first glance, the town of Edwardsville, Ala., with a population of 194 people, might raise a few eyebrows with its bid to receive $375 million from the economic stimulus package being assembled by Barack Obama and lawmakers in Congress.

At second glance too.

The tiny town, located near the Georgia border and 26 miles from the nearest "big city" of Anniston (population: 24,276), added 33 proposals—about two thirds of them related to "green" energy—to the list of "ready-to-go-projects" assembled by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Total sum: $375,076,200.

OMG, "green" energy! Paging Al Gore! Blessing required on aisle 5!

There's certainly no denying that Edwardsville has big ambitions. Through the various proposals, which include a renewable energy museum, scenic railroad, and vineyards, these small Alabama communities envision themselves becoming a cutting-edge demonstration project for energy sustainability and a hub for tourism.

Renewable energy museum, scenic railroad, and vineyards? Sounds as energy efficient as Al Gore's palatial mansion.

"Do you know how hard it is to fund some of these projects when your tax base is so low?" Phillips says. "So we just breathed this sigh of relief when we found out about the stimulus package . . . especially when it had a focus on renewable energy."

I heard the gravy train was arriving soon too, but I was just too slothful to get in my application. However, it's great to see that the poor rural folks in Edwardsville are really getting into the "Chedda" lifestyle.  Unfortunately, there are always a few wet blankets:

"This really exemplifies the problem. Why are we buying light bulbs for a local community?" asks Tom Schatz, president of the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste. "If a municipality wants to save money, [it can] go out and buy the light bulbs. There is no reason the federal government should buy them."

Aw c'mon Tom, check this out:

One of Edwardsville's biggest proposed expenditures is for a "renewable energy museum and information dissemination center." Phillips envisions exhibits, audio tours, seminars, a research center, and a satellite lab run by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

To fund the museum, Edwardsville is requesting $32.1 million. That makes the facility the fourth most expensive museum proposed on the U.S. Conference of Mayors list—following facilities planned by Miami, Las Vegas, and Scottsdale, Ariz. (Some of those facilities have drawn their own controversy: Las Vegas's proposal for a $55 million "mob museum," for example, was used by Sen. Mitch McConnell this week as a prime example of pork spending.)

Mob museum in Las Vegas? How cool is that? Maybe they'll have a section devoted to the infamous Reid Crime Family! 

But I digress. You have to admire the chutzpah of the Edwardsville folks - why shouldn't they belly up to the bar for the free lunch just like the city slickers?

Some might wonder how many people a renewable energy museum in rural Alabama could attract. And there are other routes for museum funding, like the Institute of Museum and Library Services. If a project can't get funding through competitive grants, Schatz says, perhaps it shouldn't get funding at all.

"Clearly, no one else has been interested in funding this, so why should we be doing it now?" he asks, referring to all the projects on the U.S. Conference of Mayors list that are using the stimulus as a last-ditch funding effort. "Why should the federal government be doing something now that you couldn't do yourself?"

Tom, Tom, Tom! You just don't have the Obama spirit!

The energy museum speaks to Edwardsville's larger hope: becoming a tourist destination. The town has requested $37 million for a solar energy-enhanced "scenic railroad line." It's also asking for $9 million to go toward establishing an eventual 640 acres of vineyards, 160 acres of which would be launched first. Each of the four vineyards would be designed around the theme of a different European country and, in a bid for weddings, dotted with gazebos and chapels.

To some, the vineyards, in particular, seem dubious. The Southeast is subject to a disease that puts traditional European grape varieties out of reach, usually limiting vineyards to the muscadine grape. Partly as a result, vineyards haven't exactly been the region's strong suit. Georgia has just 1,100 acres of vineyards, while Mississippi has 400. (Compare that with California's 800,000 or even Pennsylvania's 12,000.) The 640 acres for vineyards that Edwardsville ultimately wants to establish would nearly double the vineyard acreage of the entire state of Alabama, which is currently at 650.

Ya gotta have high hopes if you want Obama and Congrees to grease your palm.

It's not yet known whether Edwardsville will get any money from the stimulus package at all. There's no guarantee as to how many projects, if any, on the mayors list will get federal funding. And although $375 million may seem like a lot of money, it's also a fraction of the $96,638,419,313 requested by all the towns on the list.

Is that good news or bad news?

I really have to get in on this stimulus scam. Hmm, I guess first I need to incorporate myself as a town and elect myself mayor. Maybe I could even get Mrs. Philosopher to vote for me if I promised her a government grant.

Where's Al Gore when you really need some hot air?

A picture from a Chicago friend illustrates the sad state of Global Warming alarmism:

Anyone who cares to notice knows that the political climate scientists have been cooking the books to try to prove that there actually is any global warming and that the evidence for man made global warming is nonexistent, but the ecoweenies have their propaganda machine ranting at full force so it may well take a really nasty winter in the USA before average folks figure out that they are being conned. Some useful tidbits via Deroy Murdock:

Actually, the odds are rising that snow, ice, and cold will grow increasingly common. As serious scientists repeatedly explain, global cooling is here. It is chilling temperatures and so-called "global-warming."

According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2008 will be America's coldest year since 1997, thanks to La Niña and precipitation in the central and eastern states. Solar quietude also may underlie global cooling. This year's sunspots and solar radiation approach the minimum in the Sun's cycle, corresponding with lower Earth temperatures. This echoes Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas' belief that solar variability, much more than CO2, sways global temperatures.
...
"Global Warming is over, and Global Warming Theory has failed. There is no evidence that CO2 drives world temperatures or any consequent climate change," Imperial College London astrophysicist and long-range forecaster Piers Corbyn wrote British Members of Parliament on Oct. 28. "According to official data in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been colder than that year, yet CO2 has been rising rapidly." That evening, as the House of Commons debated legislation on so-called "global-warming," October snow fell in London for the first time since 1922.
...
So, is this all just propaganda concocted by Chevron-funded, right-wing, flat-Earthers? Ask Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a physical chemist and retired Navy meteorologist.

"As a scientist and lifelong liberal Democrat, I find the constant regurgitation of the anecdotal, fear mongering clap-trap about human-caused global warming to be a disservice to science," Hertzberg wrote in Sept. 26's USA Today. "From the El Niño year of 1998 until Jan., 2007, the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere near its surface decreased some 0.25 C (0.45 F). From Jan., 2007 until the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C (1.35 F)."

As global cooling becomes more widely recognized, Americans from Maine to Malibu should feel comfortable dreaming of a white Christmas.

I certainly am, but I expect that in Castle Gore, the Dark Prince of Climate BS is chewing the carpets. Would you buy carbon credits from anyone, much more that crazed bozo? Of course, no one seems to have mentioned this little cognitive problem to Barack Obama:

When will the "Let us take over and wreck your economy so we can save you from the climate boogey-man" gang admit the earth is cooling again, and when will they admit, "OK, since cooling is worse than warming, and our own theory is that mankind can impact global temperature by what we burn, it's now your duty to hold back the Big Freeze by going out there and burning all the fossil fuels you possibly can, as fast as you can"?

(Don't even get me started on "carbon trading," a weird scam in which the buyer acquires an invisible commodity of no earthly use to him, and both buyer and seller can benefit if they overestimate the amount being "transferred.")

Instead, on Monday, President-Elect Obama ("Delay is no longer an option; denial is no longer an acceptable response") appointed as Secretary of Energy (a position and an office not authorized in the Constitution) Steven Chu, the confirmed global warming lunatic from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who says coal -- the stuff that powered the industrial revolution, cheap coal which will last for centuries and which can be burned more cleanly now than ever before -- "is my worst nightmare."

This gang still intends to effectively ban both coal-fired and nuclear power generation. Do they believe they can meet our current demand with famously costly, unreliable, and toxic wind, solar and geothermal? (Look up the by-products of geothermal energy, some time. Then look up "battery farms.") Of course not. The gap can only be closed by "conservation," they'll admit when you take a pencil and start to work the numbers.

And what does "conservation" mean, precisely?

They'd like us to think they mean just turning out the lights in our empty rooms, that kind of thing. But they don't.

Mr. Obama has said it, straight out. He, the Chosen One, has had it Revealed to Him that we can no longer use 25 percent of the world's energy when we have only 5 percent of the world's population.

This is nonsense. All mankind uses less than 1 percent of the solar energy that streams past us every hour. Is it "unfair" that the Japanese eat "more than their fair per capita share" of the world's fish?

Are we now to be ruled by a depraved schoolchild obsessed with sharing the toys, granted the ability to carry forward that Ding-Dong School philosophy with powers reminiscent of the kid in the old "Twilight Zone" episode who could "wish people into the cornfield"?

We should be proud that we've learned how to capture and harness the lion's share of the available energy in this system. It's not like we refused to share with others "the secret of coal" or "the secret of oil," is it? They saw how good it was; they've been racing to catch up to us ever since; that's the main reason the world has escaped the life expectancies of the Stone Age.

There's a real world out there. Purposely, artificially impoverish the nation, force us to give up our competitive economic advantages, and we'll eventually go the way of the Carthaginians.

I tend to think of the latter days of the Roman Empire, but whatever it is, it only happens if we let these loons do it to us. So - let it snow.

Cuba gets oil, we get another hosing from the Democrats

Cuba Discovers Oil While Democrats Block Drilling:

Apparently, Cuba does not have all the environmentalist wackos to prevent it from drilling. Consequently, Cuba just found 20 billion barrels of oil off its shores in the Gulf of Mexico, and now plans to be one of the top 20 exporting countries in the world.

This story alone should disqualify the Democrats from being reelected. Had there not been a moratorium on drilling, that oil would have been ours. What is wrong with this Country? Cuba is literally drilling where we are not allowed to drill! Had we discovered 20 billion barrels overnight, the price of gasoline would drop to close to $2.00 per gallon, and OPEC would have less leverage because we would control our own supply.

From the source article:

...it puts Cuba's reserves on par with those of the US and into the world's top 20. Drilling is expected to start next year by Cuba's state oil company Cubapetroleo, or Cupet.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for all the professional ecoweenies in the Democrat party to chain themselves to the drilling platforms to prevent it. First home mortgages, now oil: is there anything the Donks can't screw up?

Harry Reid does Chicken Little

Check out Harry Reid's entry for the Global Warming "Sky is Falling" contest:


Of course, ole crooked Harry and his larcenous progeny aren't ecoweenies when it comes to land development deals.

The UN says to use wind-up alarm clocks to reduce global warming

From the Global Warming News Site comes proof that American taxpayers sure get full value from all the money we send to the UN:

People can help slow global warming with minor lifestyle changes such as using wind-up alarm clocks, taking direct flights and replacing aged appliances, a United Nations study found.

Using a spring-driven clock instead of an electric prevents 48 grams (1.7 ounces) of carbon-dioxide emissions daily, while air-drying clothes saves 2.3 kilograms (5.1 pounds) daily, the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program said today in an e-mailed statement. Jogging in the park rather than on a treadmill at a gym can cut 1 kilogram of carbon dioxide, or CO2, the main pollutant blamed for global warming.

People living in wealthy countries emit more than 10 metric tons (11 tons) of CO2 each per year, a figure that must drop to 2 metric tons by 2050 to slow the rate of temperature increases, according to the German environment ministry. About half of an individual's carbon output can be eliminated with ``little or no change in comfort,'' the UNEP said.

I see there's no word on battery powered dildos which are so vital to the UN lifestyle. Personally, I've got my own plan to do my part on Carbon Belch Day:

On June 12, we’re calling on people around the globe to do their part to save the planet by unleashing a healthy Carbon Belch.

There’s so much you can do to increase your carbon footprint on Carbon Belch Day -- mow your lawn, go for a drive, gather neighbors for a barbecue (calculate your carbon belch here). In fact, there’s something for everyone. It’s never been so easy to do your part.

Today's Hoot: It's easy to observe Earth Hour

Just follow the lead of ecoweenie Cate Blanchett! Local Oaf summarizes:

So all you have to do to be part of Earth Hour is to use all the energy earlier on, allowing you to be virtuous during the specified hour.

On that basis, I’ve been having my own personal Earth Hour every day for decades between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.!

Who knew saving Mother Gaia could be so easy?

When will they apologize for trying to scam us with Global Warming?

On the way to state control of every facet of our lives to prevent the dubious boogeyman of Global Warming, the ecoweenies have run into a roadblock - temperatures are actually going down without the benefit of any of their nostrums:

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases.

If man-made greenhouse gases have any discernible effect at all except in the computer models of aspiring socialists.

The hustlers have been trying to substitute "climate change" for "global warming" as their problem has become increasingly evident, but with minimal success as even the dopiest general citizen is aware that d'oh, you can't have it both ways. What I want to know, is when the ecoweenies will apologize for trying to foist this egregious fraud off on us. I'm not holding my breath.

Bubba says we'll have to live in caves

I see that Bill Clinton is endorsing the ecoweenie call for a return to life in caves to avoid offending Mother Gaia, but while I'm sure it will endear him to the Al Gore crowd of one sheet toilet paper users, I don't really think it's going to keep Hillary from swanning about in private jets or Bubba himself jetting off to far places to swing multi-billion dollar deals for campaign contributors. Hey, taking dubious largesse and private jet rides is the Democrat way and I'm sure they'd be deeply saddened to give them up - that's for the little people.